The Enervating Quality of Appeals to ‘the Communist Life’
Mickey Moosenhauer 2022
In order for communists, communizers, anarchists, the ultraleft, the left-vitalists, the ‘destituent partisans’, etc, to move forward they need to recognize and investigate the millenarianism that underpins and directs (thereby hindering and halting) their analyses.
This might be difficult, of course. Marx assiduously endeavored to distance himself from any kind of utopianism or millenarianism by claiming that the desire for a communist life was part of our ‘species being’ and that the inevitability of communism could be discerned by a proper scientific understanding of (a) the contradictions within modern society and (b) the existence of communism, not as a state of affairs to be established, but as “the concrete becoming” (real movement) of the proletariat.
Nowadays, following ‘the defeats’ of the last century, the thesis that the revolutionary subject is the proletariat has been amended or discarded… with perhaps ‘catastrophic’ consequences for the relationship of ‘revolutionaries’ to the working class — see the current prevalence of individualist libertarianism (a development of the notion of ‘self-realization’ as articulated by such as Karl Marx and Emma Goldman) in ‘ultraleft’ groups (such as Tiqqun, Lundi matin, Endnotes, etc), and the decades-long associations of figures such as Jacques Camatte and Giorgio Agamben with the far-right.
Yet, the assumption that the communist life is still essentially on, or maybe (as the Marxist academics like to imply now) just beyond, ‘the horizon’, plays the same central role in analysis. Marx’s notion of ‘the real movement’ (the concrete becoming) is not dead.
Marx believed his formulation of communism was free of millenarianism by insisting it was scientific, founded upon an empirical investigation of modern society and its subjects — this is what Bordiga identified as the “invariance” in Marx’s “theory of the proletariat”.
After ‘the defeat’ of 1968 Camatte amended Amadeo Bordiga’s ‘invariance’ (or tells us what Bordiga ‘really meant’) in order to abandon ‘the theory of the proletariat’. Camatte wrote, “the theory of which invariance was posited is communism” and continues: “The invariance is that of the yearning to rediscover the lost community; this is achieved not by a re-actualization of the past but through an act of creation” (Jacques Camatte, Invariance, Series II, # 3, April 1973, p121).
Camatte therefore removes one of the two ‘scientific’ prongs by which Marx could scientifically insist that capitalism would pass. This is the issue of ‘fatal contradictions’ within capitalism — Camatte insists these have been overcome, but in capital’s favor since the working class has shown that it is, in fact, an agent of capital (as it certainly is, of course, as are we all, including the ‘revolutionaries’ themselves).
But the other prong remains: the ‘species being’ prong — which Marx termed ‘the concrete becoming’ (real movement).
For Camatte the invariance (the one remaining prong that anticipates communism) has become “the yearning to rediscover the lost community”. But this now sounds just like the millenarianism that has existed in various forms since the dawn of civilization.
Indeed, Camatte even refers to himself as a prophet: “it is through me that a certain humanity establishes itself. I want to bear witness to this. I am, if you want, like a prophet”.
So, although it was there at the very beginning of Marx’s ‘scientific’ journey, despite his attempts to remove and disavow all moralism and moral imperative (German Idealism) in his own theories, his communism was proved to rely on shaky grounds thru the experience and analysis of 1968.
In reality, his whole project, and the project of his amenders (communists, communizers, the ultraleft, the ‘destituent partisans’) and critics (anarchists, left-vitalists) has been returned to us as the modern, updated millenarianism of the first millenarian we know of: Zoroaster.
Communist/anarchist/Marxist millenarianism is usually expressed at the end of texts supporting this or that popular discontent or, more subtly, at the end of weighty interventions on a topic. They go something like this:
“Yes, we must support the actions of [insert name], but we must also realize that the only way this problem will be solved for good is by the overthrow of existing conditions in their entirety and the establishment of a communist life.”
The self-defeating ‘problem’ with the millenarianism that lurks behind such texts, and directs their conclusions, is that the texts themselves only work to enervate the reader. The reader is left with either an impossible task (overthrow society itself, but don’t let the Leninists take power) that saps their will to live, or, if they are already one of the faithful readers, they can relish ‘the beautiful dream’ as they doze off to sleep…
No matter how hard the Marxists et al try to base their hopes upon ‘material circumstances’ rather than an appeal to peoples’ better natures, they are still stuck with having to convince enough people that their cause is right, no matter how vague it is.
Jasper Bernes (2021) of Endnotes writes: “Communism is a way out perhaps, a last hope, but only a fool could think it inevitable now”. This statement, of course, appears to abandon the ‘science’ (‘dialectical materialism’) Marx employed to tell us that capitalism would deliver communism through its fatal contradictions.
But, in the attempt to avoid going full moral-imperative (“Listen to us and follow the true path!”) Bernes, reframes the moralism/science in terms (following Théorie Communiste) of a set of four “tasks”:
1) Immediate abolition of the parliamentary, bureaucratic, repressive state, and all legal subjects.
2) Expropriation of means of production by self-organized bodies producing directly for social use.
3) Break the link between right and responsibility, labor contribution and receipt of social wealth. Ration, if necessary, based on need not contribution.
4) Communize consumption, distribution, and production according to common, freely devised plan.
(From The Test of Communism, Jasper Bernes, 2021: https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2021/03/12/the-test-of-communism/#more-10180)
But in order for these ‘tasks’ to be accomplished there needs to be enough of us onside with the ‘communist’ program: so these tasks are, in reality, a sermon to be spread amongst the masses. They are not ‘tasks’ as such at all, they are The Plan of the (potential/immanent/becoming) cadre.
The problem with the notion of ‘real movement’ is that it’s become (since Gilles Dauvé) an ‘article of faith’ countenancing no objection (though it is now done weakly, in the style of a Bartleby who ‘prefers not to’ lose faith) — in the same way as Marx countenanced Bakunin’s ‘idealist’ objections to Marx’s ‘science’ with the quip: “schoolboy drivel”.
Idris Robinson (https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/idris-robinson-postscript-on-pain) repeats ‘the science’ of the concrete becoming in contrast to idealism:
“Of course, this [communist life] could never be achieved through idealist methods, whether it be writing, speaking, or diversity training. Instead, like the old man once told us, every step of real movement is more important than a dozen articles and essays” (Idris Robinson, 2022). (What about two dozen?)
One has to wonder if the ‘high priests’ of the real movement (academic Marxists, that is, those who truly understand it) really believe in it, since they have so much trouble trying to lay it out clearly or honestly. But then, faith is like that.
But there is perhaps a case to argue that, like many ‘real’ priests in present-day churches, they actually lost their faith a while ago… and that they maintain ‘the line’ for their ‘parishioners’ or ‘flock’… Or maybe their ‘faith’ ultimately nets them a position in the Academy (utilizing the conveyor-belt of university ‘radicality’ and ‘radical’ language) and then simply serves to pay the bills after a hard day’s philosophizing at the academic citadel?
PS
On faith and divining for ‘truth’:
“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” (Thomas Aquinas, 1225–1274)
“The fact that faith moves no mountains, but may very readily raise them where previously they did not exist — this is made sufficiently clear by a mere casual stroll through a lunatic asylum.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1888)
“The task for a contemporary science of the species is to once more read the runes of our times, in order to understand how the non-movements themselves reveal the anti-formistic tendency of our period, and how, in their confusion, we can identify the eclipse of the social forms that we call capital, state and class. Since communism is the real non-movement that abolishes these social forms, we say to the masses who confront our tottering order — avanti barbari! — onward barbarians.” (Endnotes, 2020)
